The residents of The Gardens and areas surrounding the proposed Pender Place and Mercury House development yesterday said they are disappointed and disgusted at the way in which the Malta Environment and Planning Authority Board rode roughshod over their valid objections.

The residents are now actively considering the next administrative and legal steps to be taken so that their legitimate objections will be seriously considered.

In a statement, they said the mammoth project is going to squeeze just short of 400 residences and car parking facilities for over 1,000 cars in an area as large as two football pitches, in what has always been strictly a villa area under previous planning schemes.

“The outline application now approved by Mepa authorises the building of blocks ranging from seven stories to 22 storeys high just across the road from some residences, completely blocking out the sun for long parts of the day, as well as a four-storey deep car park in one part of the development which is still far beyond the needs of the residential and commercial requirements of the proposed development.”

They said that although some modifications were made, which marginally cushioned the impact of the development mostly to accommodate the developers themselves, they are objecting to the sheer density of the project and its deleterious effect on the health and quality of life of the neighbourhood, due to the severe pollution which will be generated by the public car park.

“The charade at Thursday’s meeting got off to a bad start when almost half of the residents who turned up for the meeting at Mepa’s invitation, advertised in the media, were refused entry on the grounds that the meeting room was full up.

“As it turned out, half the available seats had already been occupied by the developers, their consultants and lawyers and as a result it took some of the residents hours before they could finally make it into the room,” the residents said.

They said that despite the fact that the various reports of the consultants commissioned by Mepa listed an interminable litany of adverse impacts of the project, “the Mepa board only budged from the proposals when the developers themselves, for reasons best known to them, asked to curtail the number of spaces earmarked for the public car park. This appears to have been approved in principle”.

Other serious objections to the exaggerated height of the blocks of flats and the towers, the density of the project, the control of entry to the site at night time and, above all, the menace of air pollution were not decided upon at all or else were conveniently swept under the carpet as “reserved matters”, to be decided upon at a later stage, probably when the project would have already got under way and when it would be to late to stop it, the residents said.